Nocturne | Page 2

sort or that, as Burke
and Mary Austen do, while others again concentrate upon the giving of
life as it is, seen only more intensely. Personally I have no use at all for
life as it is, except as raw material. It bores me to look at things unless
there is also the idea of doing something with them. I should find a
holiday, doing nothing amidst beautiful scenery, not a holiday, but a
torture. The contemplative ecstacy of the saints would be hell to me. In
the--I forget exactly how many--books I have written, it is always about
life being altered I write, or about people developing schemes for
altering life. And I have never once "presented" life. My apparently
most objective books are criticisms and incitements to change. Such a
writer as Mr. Swinnerton, on the contrary, sees life and renders it with a
steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition.
He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the
attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation.
Seen through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal

lens, more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. There the
business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or any one to
do anything.
Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent writers in this clear,
detached objectivity. We have in England a writer, Miss Dorothy
Richardson, who has probably carried impressionism in fiction to its
furthest limit. I do not know whether she will ever make large captures
of the general reader, but she is certainly a very interesting figure for
the critic and the amateur of fiction. In Pointed Roofs and
_Honeycomb_, for example, her story is a series of dabs of intense
superficial impression; her heroine is not a mentality, but a mirror. She
goes about over her facts like those insects that run over water
sustained by surface tension. Her percepts never become concepts.
Writing as I do at the extremest distance possible from such work, I
confess I find it altogether too much--or shall I say altogether too
little?--for me. But Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not
repudiate the depths for the sake of the surface. His people are not
splashes of appearance, but living minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book
are realities inside and out; they are imaginative creatures so complete
that one can think with ease of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a
baby. The fickle Alf is one of the most perfect Cockneys--a type so
easy to caricature and so hard to get true--in fiction. If there exists a
better writing of vulgar lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly
mean and so touchingly full of the craving for happiness than this that
we have here in the chapter called _After the Theatre_, I do not know
of it. Only a novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully
what a dance among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a
tight-rope performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false
note, one fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay
brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter
brutally, with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it
is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into
sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse
of "better things" in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have
converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf
and Emmy is that at no point does a "nature's gentleman" or a "nature's
lady" show through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by

comparison with this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and
Jenny seems to fall short of perfection. But that also is at last perfected,
I think, by Jenny's final, "Keith.... Oh, Keith!..."
Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of "Pa."
Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if
any one without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is
made and completed and rounded off by Pa's beer, Pa's needs, and Pa's
accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and
what an enviable triumph his achievement is.
But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits
further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this
one, but none of them compare with it in quality. His earlier books
were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have
something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the
artistic completeness and